Whatever the Russians say in their defense must always always be weighed against reason, what is within reasonable probability, since you and I know Russia wants to wiggle out of this mess and pin the blame on its enemy Ukraine. So what is reasonable here?
I will begin by telling you what is outside of reason: it is outside of reason to claim that a state or military (Ukraine in this case) will shoot down a civilian airliner of a country it is not at war with that is full of passengers that are not citizens of its enemy just so that it can pin the blame against its enemy (Russia). In fact, if you tell me that Putin (however dillusional he is) has ordered the specific downing of MH17 then I will outrightly tell you that it is outside the realm of reason. It would be a different story if the reason is reprisal like Lockerbie bombing, then this is more likely. But what does Ukraine have against my country that it must shoot down one oft he planes of our national carrier? Nothing!
So what is reasonable then in this murderous tragedy? It is reasonable to believe based on the totality of the circumstances so far known about the Ukrainian conflict that MH17 was mistook for a Ukrainian military transport by the rebels or Russian operators manning a Buk SAM supplied by Russia to be used against Ukrainian targets. This is what I call murder by stupidity.
If you already know that the rebels
might have mistakenly shot the plane, then why do you keep blabbering from the start that Putin must be hanged for this?. Just like US supports the murderous regime with contractors from Blackwater and strategists from CIA, Russia supports the rebels which has the majority Russian speaking population.
Call it a conspiracy theory, but here is my moderate theory (since I don't have all the data.. call the americans, will ya? ). US/Ukraine has solid evidence of Russian Buk missiles being transported and rebels possessing it (US ofcourse has the data from the dedicated satellite which monitors the SAM launches in the region. Now they observed a pattern of flights getting downed. Now they drew up a plan to pin the blame on Russia and the rebels and turn the losing game swiftly into a position of advantage to Ukraine. How do they turn the international opinion against Rebels without dirtying their hands? Now the strategists pulled out how the air traffic is passing every day and got a master plan.
First they deployed all the Buk SAM's at multiple points near the rebel region and make sure they monitored it from the radars. That's why there was an increasing concentration of Ukrainian Buk's which are active even though there is no rebel airforce to counter. They calculated all the possible paths and the reaction time once the Buk's get fired. They sent a AN-26 transport and the rebels shot it down. And now the rebels are boasting about it in twitter. The real mission started immediately after the AN-26 was shot down. The first possible victim was identified (target MH-17 flying towards the rebel airspace). They made sure that there are atleast a couple of civilian aircrafts passing near behind MH-17 just in case. Now they were tracking the flight and the Su-25's were timed to be there by the MH-17 at the same time when MH-17 will be in the range of Buk's. They sent 2 Su-25's just to make sure they grab the attention of rebels. They were nearby MH-17 and the moment they detected a launch towards them, they crossed off MH-17 to the other side and that's why you see MH-17 veering of the path. The Buk hit your plane. Since higher ups in Ukraine knew about this, the military is there ready at the Kiev ATC just in case. The moment the Spanish ATC guy in Kiev put it on twitter that Su-25's are there escorting Su-25, they were evacuated within minutes and the twitter account deleted. Objective achieved. Now Russia can't accept that their Buk's were there with the rebels (the article related to Reuters that you are blabbering about). US immediately proclaimed the proofs were there and Russia is guilty of it. Ukraine got justification to massacre the civilians in the rebel areas. Now since the world is so much prejudiced against any information from Russia (count yourself and Akim and few others here), it is very easy to manipulate the media which is already in western control. Russia can't prove anything without putting itself in the mix. A catch 22 there.
That's a brief of it. All the required details to support this theory are there in this thread. I just connected the dots. Whether it's true or not, that's something i can't tell. But certainly i can tell that the motive is good enough for Ukraine to plot a mudsling operation like this. Rebels and MH17 possible victims. And all of this is prequel to the coming war which in no uncertain terms is going to happen and the change in the world's power equations.